These newsletters are divided only very generally
into Causes and Prevention because most authors examine the two subjects
together. Clear identification of the causes of wars is a significant step toward
preventing them. See War
Prevention and Related Newsletters.

This letter supports a
campaign by the American Friends Service Committee asking Congress to pass H.R.
2324 or S. 1919, legislation that will formally repeal the Authorization for
the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Your letters will be sent to Congress.

It’s
time to retire the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force). Signed just
three days after 9/11, Congress never intended to justify perpetual war.

The AUMF was broadly worded, but it specified targets involved in the 9/11
attacks. None of the 9/11 fighters remain in the current Middle East
conflicts.

If we fail to repeal the AUMF, the President will continue to have overly wide
latitude. President Obama maintains a four-President tradition by bombing Iraq.
Without better checks and balances, we will never stop waging endless war.
Repeal AUMF now.

David Daley, Salon, Reader
Supported News, April 10, 2014Daley writes: "The rest of the world, almost unanimously, looks at
America as the No. 1 warmonger."READ
MORE

How the US
Energy Boom Is Harming Foreign Policy

Rising oil and gas production close to
home is enabling a more aggressive stance toward rivals abroad. [“Reduced reliance on Middle Eastern oil has
enabled the Obama administration TO TAKE A HARDER LINE TOWARD Iran, Russia, and
China, among others. “ --Dick]

Opponents of the Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline have focused largely on its disproportionate role in global
warming. President Obama gave a nod to this concern last June, when he said he
would deny approval for Keystone if research indicated that its completion
would “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” (The
president has final say in the matter because the proposed pipeline will cross
an international boundary.) But proponents of Keystone—including some in the
president’s inner circle—place great emphasis on its geopolitical value,
claiming that it will enhance America’s
economic prowess and reduce its vulnerability to overseas supply disruptions.
Now, with the January 31 release of a State Department–mandated report alleging
that construction of Keystone will not significantly increase global emissions
because so much tar sands oil is being imported by rail and other means, it
appears likely that this argument will prevail. But far from bolstering US
security, this approach is bound to produce new risks and dangers.

That professions of national security would trump the future of
the planet might seem absurd to many, but not to anyone who has followed
the evolution of the administration’s strategic thinking. Initially, Obama’s
principal international objectives were to withdraw from ground wars in the
Middle East and refurbish the US
image abroad. Energy played little role in this, except to burnish Obama’s
status as an advocate for green technology. More recently, however, Obama has sought to counter the perceived
decline in Washington’s
global influence by any means available short of renewed military interventionism.
An “all of the above” energy policy has come to be seen as a useful tool for
this purpose. By procuring more of our energy from domestic and Canadian
sources, the White House now says, the United States can free itself from
dependence on Middle Eastern supplies and so exercise greater independence in
its foreign policy.

This outlook has arisen in
response to the application of advanced technologies like horizontal drilling
and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas and oil from previously
impenetrable shale formations. Before Obama’s first term, it was widely assumed
that domestic oil production would continue its precipitous decline as a result
of diminishing output from existing fields. A 2006 report by the Energy
Information Administration, for example, predicted that US crude oil output would drop from
5.9 million barrels a day in 2010 to 4.6 million barrels in 2030. But the surge
in oil and gas extraction from shale has upended all such assumptions. In
January, the EIA projected that domestic crude production would rise through
2030 by 0.8 million barrels a day—with most of the added output coming from
shale oil.

At the same time, Canadian
firms—with considerable foreign assistance—began to extract substantial amounts
of synthetic crude from previously noncommercial bitumen deposits (“tar sands”
or “oil sands”) in the Athabasca region of Alberta. According to the EIA, Canadian oil
output will jump from 3.6 million barrels per day in 2010 to 6.6 million
barrels in 2035. Combine this added Canadian output with rising US production,
and it is possible to picture a not-too-distant time when the United States
will be almost entirely free of reliance on Asian and African oil—something US
strategists have dreamed of for decades.

There are obstacles, of course,
to the realization of this dream. Because tar sands oil is so much richer in
carbon than conventional petroleum and requires more energy to extract (thereby
producing additional emissions), environmental groups like 350.org and Friends
of the Earth are trying to block construction of pipelines like Keystone XL
that would carry this dirty fuel into and across the United States. Also, the current
boom in shale oil output could fade as the richest “plays” in Texas
and North Dakota
are exhausted. But all this is less important than the political implications
of the boom—in particular, the emergence of a national discourse about the
energy-fueled “revitalization” of America. MORE
http://www.thenation.com/article/178694/how-us-energy-boom-harming-foreign-policy

Oil, that most precious resource, is like a double-edged
sword. It’s the energy that fuels the engines of world commerce and
contributes to the betterment of our lives in so many ways. But,
conversely, it is also the root cause of endless resource wars that
continue to bring destruction and suffering to nations and people who
are caught in the middle of the struggle to control its primary sources
and supply routes.

In recent years natural gas has been rapidly increasing as
an alternate source of energy and its importance will markedly increase
in the future. But since oil is still by far the most important of
these two resources, in this article we’ll concentrate on the
increasingly negative impact that oil has had and continues to have
within this world; and, in particular, how it has also become a great
threat to this planet’s ecosystem due to unrestricted amounts of CO2
emissions spewing into the atmosphere.

We need to consider this pertinent question: If it were
not for the struggle over control of oil in the world would the
following very destructive events in world history have ever happened?

*The establishment of a powerful U.S. military presence in
the Middle East over many decades following World War II. Would
monumental amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent to control
this otherwise insignificant region of the world if it did not offer
something of great value to the U.S., namely oil?

*Operation Desert Storm that took place in Iraq in 1991
over Saddam Hussein’s attempt to take control of Kuwait’s oilfields;
incidentally, Kuwait was a major supplier of oil to the U.S.

*The inhuman, unconscionable sanctions in the 1990’s,
during the presidencies of Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, by which more
than 500,000 Iraqi children died from malnutrition and a lack of
medical supplies.

*The 911 disaster when terrorists seeking revenge against
the U.S. brought down the World Trade Center.

*The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Bush/Cheney
were well aware that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass
destruction; they also knew that he had huge reserves of oil located in
the heart of the oil-rich Middle East.

*The emergence and growth of Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists
that are in the process of wreaking havoc and destruction in the Middle
East. It’s ironic how ISIS is obtaining much of its funding by selling
confiscated oil from oilfields in Iraq and Syria on the black market.

*The War on Terror, initiated by G.W. Bush and now being
escalated by Barack Obama; the means by which the U.S. government
attempts to justify its endless wars to control oil.

In the prelude to World War II would Japan have attacked
Pearl Harbor if it were not for oil? Many Americans may not be aware
that the U.S. was Japan’s principal supplier of oil at that time and,
that in 1941, after Japan’s aggressive military moves in the
Asian-Pacific region, the U.S. initiated an oil embargo against it.
Japan then reacted to that move by launching the deadly attack on Pearl
Harbor.

As the price of gasoline in America declines it’s
noteworthy that Middle East experts are tying it to a plan by Saudi
Arabia designed to cripple the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad,
president of Syria, and totally disrupt that nation’s close ties to
Russia and Iran. This excellent article by F. William Engdahl indicates
what exactly is happening as this latest scenario involving oil unfolds
in the Middle East.

Yes, oil has, unquestionably, contributed directly to
these wars and military conflicts that have brought immeasurable damage
and suffering to the world but its effect becomes even worse when we
consider the enormous threat that it now poses to this planet’s
ecosystem.

The people of America tend to focus only the positive,
beneficial side of oil; while they are somewhat aware of the endless
wars that it has caused they seemingly have concluded that this is just
something that must be done. And worse yet most of them are just
beginning to become aware of the great threat that oil poses to this
planet as a result of the deadly CO2 emissions that are being emitted
into the atmosphere.

Most rational-minded Americans are beginning to accept the
conclusions of 97% of climate scientists who are warning that, unless
the nations of the world dramatically reduce CO2 emissions into the
atmosphere, and do it quickly, the future of this planet and its
inhabitants is in great peril. We also know that the oceans, which
cover over 70% of the earth, are being polluted by oil spills from
ships, deliberate, illegal disposal of fuels, and natural seepage from
sea sources.

As this planet continues to remain under siege from the
harmful effects of emissions due to the use of oil, what is absolutely
astounding is the fact that there is not a massive world program, with
many nations involved, well underway to develop new sources of energy;
and the fact that America and China, the leading users of oil, are not
at the forefront of this effort.

We can’t turn back the clock but we can surely learn the
lessons from these past failures. We need to listen to and pay
attention to these climate scientists as they continue to sound the
alarms and make the case that these massive emissions must be
significantly scaled back. They continue to warn that, within a
relatively few years, this condition will become irreversible; and yet,
the leaders of the world are doing virtually nothing of substance to
address this critically important issue. This must not be allowed to
continue, change must come before it’s too late.

Two things must happen in dealing with this rapidly
approaching catastrophe. First the U.S. government, no matter who is
president in the years to come, must clearly accept the fact that these
misguided resource wars must come to an end. These wars have done
nothing but create thousands of new enemies; they feed upon themselves
and cause never-ending chaos, destruction and untold suffering.

Secondly it’s time for the leaders of the advanced nations
of the world to come together and create a permanent organization to
establish specific objectives and guidelines for the development of new
sources of energy, utilizing the best minds in the world of science and
the business sector to work together to take this world in a new
direction.

Dramatically reducing the world’s reliance on oil and
ending the destructive perpetual wars by harnessing the power of the
sun and developing other new sources of energy to restore the health of
the world’s ecosystem; that’s a win-win situation for this planet and
the future of humanity.

But time is running out; each and every day brings us ever
closer to a planetary crisis which has the potential to eventually wipe
out humanity. There is no time to waste; the point of no return is fast
approaching.

Hadley Cantril. Tensions that
Cause Wars. U of Illinois P, 1950. (A report for UNESCO). A statement on the causes of nationalistic aggression and the
conditions necessary for international understanding by eight distinguished
psychologists and social scientists. For example, Gordon Allport analyzes the
influence of expectation in
starting and continuing wars. Wars have
been so prevalent because what people expect determines their behavior, and
people expect war and therefore prepare for war not peace. Aggression is a learned habit, and therefore
one war engenders another.

Wars and Tensions Affecting International Understanding:
a Survey of Research

These two books originated in the 1947 resolutions of the UNESCO
General Assembly authorizing a study of "Tensions Affecting International
Understanding." The first contains a common statement regarding
international conflicts, with separate related articles, prepared by eight leading
social scientists who met in Paris
in 1948. The second is an effort to make an organized inventory of what is
known about this subject, partly with a view to furthering profitable research.

[Note: I assemble these newsletters mainly
serendipitously from the online and print essays and books I read. By accident, then, around the same time I
encountered the writings of Payne, Koenigsberg, and Gologorsky, which fell
together as a group on the cultural foundations of wars. –Dick]

Available
as a Google eBook,
for other eReaders and tablet devices,
Click icon below...

Summary

An analysis of the impact
of cultural values on the use of force and negotiations in American
foreign policy."Payne's exposition of the profound influence of cultural factors on state behavior offers
a needed corrective to the 'realist' school that still dominates
academic writing on international relations (in which military and
economic factors are emphasized to the virtual exclusion of ideational
considerations); it can also help policymakers become more self-aware
of the cultural biases
implicit in their actions and statements. The book's hard-hitting
exposition of American cultural
myths and prejudices and their reflection on U.S. foreign policy,
plus its accessible style, should make it useful in a variety of
courses--from American Civilization to International Relations to Peace
Studies--and to laypersons attentive to public affairs." -- Seyom
Brown, Brandeis University

"The author addresses a foreign policy
problem of major significance, that of the complex relationship between
a nation's culture and its international behavior. Payne establishes a
sound basis for his assertion that (1) American foreign policy has been
heavily dependent on the use of culturally reinforced violence, and (2)
the future cost of resolving conflicts through violence will probably
become vastly more burdensome. The time is right for a book that
suggests constructive new directions for American foreign policy. This
is a much-needed book." -- Henry T. Nash, Wheaton College

Whereas foreign policymaking is generally viewed
as a rational, unemotional, and sophisticated process, this analysis of
American policies toward the Persian Gulf, the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, and the Bosnian conflict suggests that the underlying and
largely unexamined cultural values of most ordinary Americans play a
major role in determining the United States' choice of force or
negotiation in dealing with international problems. Payne examines the
linkage between the United States'
tendency to use force in foreign policy and the culture of violence in America.
He argues that the costs of resolving conflicts militarily are likely
to become more burdensome as economic competitors seek to take
advantage of the U.S.
tendency to demonstrate resolve primarily through the application of
force. Post-Cold War challenges, Payne argues, call for a more nuanced
combination of force and diplomacy. He finds hope in the fact that a
strong component of American culture favors nonviolence, embraces
humanitarianism, and if cultivated can contribute to the peaceful
resolution of conflicts.

Richard J. Payneis
Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at IllinoisStateUniversity.
He is the author ofOpportunities and Dangers of Soviet-Cuban Expansion:
Toward a Pragmatic U.S. Policy,also
published by SUNY Press;The Nonsuperpowers and South
Africa; The West European Allies, the Third
World, and U.S.
Foreign Policy;andThe Third World and South Africa:
Post-Apartheid Challenges.

Richard Koenigsberg (and Jason Epstein), Why War?

Library of Social Scienceoanderson@libraryofsocialscience.comvia uark.edu

"Why War?"Commentary by Richard A. Koenigsberg

Extracts from
“Always Time to Kill”Review Essay by Jason Epstein

Jason Epstein on the
First World War from his Review Essay “Always Time to Kill”(Extracts
selected and edited byLibrary of Social Science)

John Keegan’s
book, The First World War,is an
invaluable summary of how (but not why) the destruction of
Europe began, In the years preceding World War I, “It was
inevitable that [relations] between all [countries] should
be infused with suspicion and rivalry. Policy was guided
not by the search for a secure means of averting conflict,
but by the age-old quest for security in military
superiority.” As in the case of the Greek city-states, the
strategies of defense were inseparable from the
preparations for war.

Keegan finds no
insuperable diplomatic or political obstacles to peace in 1914.
The explosive element was the military preparations
themselves, undertaken routinely and in secret by the
general staffs, often without consulting the diplomats or
politicians. The nations of Europe went to war mindlessly
as each general staff raised its degree of mobilization in
response to the others until finally the kettle boiled
over.

By the time war
broke out the immediate cause—Austria’s demand that it be
permitted to investigate the murder by a state-sponsored
Serbian terrorist of the Austrian archduke on a visit to
Sarajevo—was largely forgotten. Austria did not get around
to attacking Serbia for another two years.

The governments of
the original belligerents—Germany, Russia, France,
Austria—claimed not without justification to be defending
themselves preemptively against the others. Keegan shows
that even Germany can be said to have acted defensively.
Its invasion of France by way of Belgium was meant to
protect its rear while it prepared to confront Russia.

Although political
leaders were not enthusiastic, soon the crowds—aroused by
the talk of war—were roaring in the streets. The momentum
which had been building through years of peace was
irresistible. The politicians could not stop it, not did
they try. The war ignited itself. It was not the
continuation of politics by other means. It was the
abandonment of politics to the military and to the streets.

The mere existence
of nation-states and their general staffs, not their
irreconcilable differences, had given rise to the war—as if
war-making had been the underlying function of these
militarized tribes all along. In the streets of Berlin, St.
Petersburg, Vienna, and Paris men and women, accompanied by
martial music, were calling for the blood of people just
like themselves of whom they had hardly been aware a month
ago, and whom they had no reason to hate now. In St.
Petersburg, women tore their dresses off and gave them to
the troops. Parisian women showered the soldiers with
kisses.

By late July events
were beyond the control of politicians and would remain so
for four bloody years. In his Advent sermon for 1915, the
Bishop of London urged Englishmen to kill Germans…to kill
the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well
the old,…to kill them lest the civilization of the world
should itself be killed. As I have said a thousand times, I
look upon it as a war for purity…for the principles of
Christianity I look upon everyone who dies in it as a
martyr.

A German religious
journal printed a version of the Lord’s Prayer that began
“Give us each day the enemy dead…” Before the rules of
civilization could be restored, nine million people would
be killed in battle and the aftershocks would reverberate
into the following century. But Great Britain and Germany
had no compelling reason to fight.

In 1914 Europe had
not learned the price of industrialized war fought by huge
conscript armies. The bishop’s war cry, which could have
landed him in an asylum had he delivered it a year earlier,
did not cost him his pulpit. Bloomsbury and some unions opposed
the war, but the troops went to slaughter with the bishop’s
best wishes and with wide public support.

In July 1914
millions of Europeans—including an exuberant Hitler, who
can be seen in a famous photograph amid a throng of excited
Bavarians in Munich’s Odeonsplatz—were demanding war
despite widespread misgivings. Keegan shows that they had
no compelling reason to fight. Yet they fought without
stopping for four horrible years until the Germans ran out
of manpower and quit. To this day no one can say with
confidence why they fought—any more than one knows why the
Greeks fought beneath the walls of Troy unless it is the
nature of human beings to fight until they can fight no
longer.

Aggressive war is a
human trait that makes no adaptive sense. For the aggressor,
the fruits of victory are often ephemeral and unintended.
The Muslim conquest benefited the cities of Spain
aesthetically but was ruinous to the Arab aggressors, who
have yet to recover their self-confidence. The French would
have been better off without Napoleon, whose bloody
conquests came to nothing.

Had the United
States found ways to share the continent with the native
tribes instead of killing them like buffaloes, its people
would be no less rich today. History teaches that
prosperity rewards peace far more than it does war, but why
since long before Homer have war and the preparation for
war been the practice and peace only an illusion? We know
why we play games, educate our young, and defend our
cities. But “why,” in Keegan’s words, “did the states of
Europe proceed as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the
deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its
civilization.

In 1989, I was on the fourth floor of
the Bobst library at NYU. Having read most of the books on Nazism,
Hitler and the Holocaust, I drifted across the aisle and started
browsing through the volumes on the First World
War—and
was astonished at what I discovered.

I was
astonished—not only by the persistence and magnitude of the
slaughter—but by the blasé way historians described what had
occurred. It seemed as if mass murder was taken for granted:
nothing special. At least the Holocaust evoked shock and
bewilderment. But the extermination of 9 million human beings (most
of them young men) evoked little amazement.

I began
studying the topic more deeply, assuming historians would reveal
the causes. What was so significant that could generate such
massive slaughter? Of course, historians were able to trace how one
event led to another. But why did the slaughter take place? Why was
it necessary? Gradually, I realized historians were unable to
answer these questions.

Reviewing
John Keegan’sThe First World War, Epstein conveys
this great historian’s conclusion: that the nations of Europe (and
the world) “had no compelling reason to fight.” Keegan asked: “Why did the states of Europe
proceed as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the
destruction of their continent and its civilization?” It is this
question—and others like it—that we pose in this Newsletter, and
through our Websites.

The most
profound flaw in the thinking of historians and political
scientists is their assumption of
rationality.They proceed as if it is
possible to identify “real reasons” for mass murder—and for the
tendency of nation-states to proceed as if self-extermination was
their objective.

Epstein
cites a sermon presented by the Bishop of London in 1915, who urged
Englishmen to kill Germans…to kill the good as well as the bad, to
kill the young men as well the old,…to kill them lest the
civilization of the world should itself be killed. As I have said a
thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity…for the
principles of Christianity. I look upon everyone who dies in it as
a martyr.

The words
in this brief passage (that easily could have come out of Hitler’s
mouth) reveal several themes that have emerged from my research on
collective forms of violence.Warfare revolves around the idea that it is necessary tokill
or destroy the enemy.There is blind passion in
the Bishop’s words—he insists it is necessary to “kill Germans,”
the “good as well as the bad,” the “young men as well as the old”.
Why this belief that it necessary to kill—or kill off—each and
every member of another nation or societal group?

Nations and
enemies go together. It seems that one requires the other, almost
as if nationsneed
enemiesin order to energize
themselves—to stay alive. The nation’s identity seems to be
dependent on its capacity to identify an enemy to hate, revile—and
possibly kill.

The Bishop
asserts that it is necessary to kill Germans “lest the civilization
of the world should itself be killed.” I have found that the idea
of “rescuing civilization” is central in generating warfare. War is
not about “primitive aggression.” Rather, nations initiate acts of
war when they imagine that the future of civilization is at stake.

Somehow,
the other civilization (or group) is imagined to threaten the
existence of one’s own civilization. This principle applies to
contemporary political struggles—as well as the First World War.
Warfare arises as a form of morality, or moral righteousness. The
enemy Other is imagined to be acting to destroy one’s own society.
Violent acts are therefore necessary—required.

Hitler
explained, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany, we have
performed the greatest deed in the world.” If you think about any
case of political violence that you have studied or are familiar
with, you will probably conclude that Hitler’s statement is
applicable. Collective forms of violence are undertaken in the name
of arescue
fantasy.“Yes, we are performing acts
of inhumane violence. However, if our nation or society is to
survive, we have no other choice but to undertake them.”

The
Bishop’s war cry, Epstein observes, could have “landed him in an
asylum” had he delivered it a year earlier. Warfare, it would
appear, renders normal what in other circumstances would be judged
insane. Outside the context of war, asking men to get out of
trenches and to run into machine gun fire and artillery shells for
four years—would be considered a form of insanity.

This,
perhaps, is the normal or natural reaction of a human being who has
not been socialized into the historical discourse on the First
World War. And yes, what occurred between 1914 and 1918wasinsane. However, we don’t
like to say this. We shy away from acknowledging that insane forms
of behavior arecontained
within the fabric of civilization.

What’s
more, human beings seem not to beashamedof their proclivity toward
mass murder and self-destruction. Leaders who are responsible for
the deaths of millions of human beings often live to a ripe old
age. Perhaps we are even proud of our willingness to kill and die
for abstract ideas—our sacred ideals. It’s what distinguishes us
from other animals.

Can we
begin to “bracket” the ideology of warfare—to conceive of this
institution as something other than who we are? Post-modernists
have deconstructed nearly everything. However, the idea of warfare
(and of the nation-state, which generates war) reigns supreme.

We may not
be ready to conceive of warfare as an institutionalized form of
insanity. So let’s say that warfare is like a dream that many
people are having at once: a collective fantasy that has been
embraced and called “reality.”

We Hope you
will join us in our project of working to awaken from the nightmare
of history.

Why Does War Exist?

Library of Social Scienceoanderson@libraryofsocialscience.comvia uark.edu

oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com

WHY
DOES WARFARE EXIST?

by Richard A. Koenigsberg

Warfare
is a culturally-defined institution or form of behavior
that has existed within many societies throughout history.
But why has warfare existed? Why does it continue to exist?
What is the “function” of a societal institution that has
produced massive destruction and self-destruction? Why have
human beings created ideologies of war? And why do we enact
these ideologies?

Are
we to believe that each instance or manifestation of war
has unique, idiosyncratic causes—that can be uncovered or
revealed only through a study of the particular cultural
and historical contexts in which a given war occurs? Or
does war manifest a fundamental complex—a dynamic that is
enacted in similar ways—at many times and in many places?

The Psychological
Interpretation of Culture

I
suggest that—in order to answer this question—what is
required is a psychological approach to the study of ideology,
culture and history. This approach seeks to identify the
sources and meanings of society’s cultural formations. For
any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does
it exist?”

Speaking
broadly, contemporary cultural theory postulates that mind
is shaped by discourse. Warfare constitutes a particular
mode of discourse: an ideology or way of thinking about the
social world. But why does the discourse of warfare exist?
Why is the ideology of warfare a “dominant discourse”?

Cultures
are social constructions. But constructed on what
foundation, and for what purpose? To understand an element
of culture requires uncovering the psychic function it
provides or performs. For any belief system or institution
within a society, one may pose the question: What
psychological work does this element of culture perform for
members of the society? What is the nature of the
gratification that it provides? An ideology or institution
comes into being—and is embraced and perpetuated—insofar as
it does something (psychologically) for individuals within
that society.

We
tend to assume that there is a reality that exists “out
there” (constituted by language, discourse, etc.). We feel
that the “external world” exists separately from the minds
of the human beings who experience this reality. Of course,
each of us is born into a symbolic system that is present
before we exist. Thus, we say that mind is shaped by
discourse.

Still,
we may pose the question: Why does any particular symbolic
system exist in the first place? Why does each symbolic
system assume a particular form? Why has this particular
ideology been perpetuated (and not others)? Or—in the old
language of cultural anthropology—why are certain ideas and
institutions “passed along” (while others are not)?

Because
we experience symbolic systems as overwhelming in their
impact, we imagine that they constitute “objective
realities”—separate from actual human beings. We experience
society as an entity “out there”; up above us. Based on
this experience, we forget the human source of our social
world. We embrace cultural creations, but forget that we
have created them.

Psychic Determinism:
The Human Source of Cultural Forms

Freud’s
analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue and psychosomatic
symptoms was guided by the principle of psychic
determinism, which asserted that there are no accidents in
the life of the mind. Our mental life is the source of the
images we dream at night, the mistakes and blunders of our
everyday life and the pains in our bodies.

A
psychological approach extends the principle of psychic
determinism into the study of culture. We examine belief
systems, ideologies, institutions and historical events
based on the assumption thatthese cultural forms and events have not arisen by
chance.We are the source of
that which exists.

Why
do people imagine or pretend that ideologies and
institutions have a “life of their own”: as if they exist
and are perpetuated independently of the human beings who
create and embrace them? Why do we experience culture or
society as something that descends upon us from above, as
if it constitutes another domain of existence—separate from
human beings?

Societies
were created by human beings, and continue to exist in
certain forms by virtue of the fact that we embrace that
which we have created. Cultural forms exist to the extent
that they allow us to externalize, work through and come to
terms with our deepest desires, fears, conflicts and
fantasies. Cultural ideas and institutions are not separate
from the psychic functions that they perform.

Norman O. Brown:
Culture as Shared Fantasy

Norman O. Brown
(1959) suggeststhat culture exists
in order to “project unconscious fantasies into external
reality.” By virtue of their projection into the cultural
world, we are able to “see”—and attempt to master—our
fantasies. The creation of culture is thus analogous to the
creation of the transference in the psychoanalytic
situation: inner desires and fantasies become externalized
into objects in the world.

Culture
or society functions as a canvas—or transference
screen—into which we project our desires, conflicts and
existential dilemmas, seeking to enact our fantasies in the
external world.Weston La Barre
(1954)stated that man in
culture is “man dreaming while awake.” To understand a
particular culture, therefore, is to decipher thenature of the dream or dreams that define that
society.

Dreams
and desires, anxieties and fantasies—are the source of our
cultural creations: “We are that.” We are not separate from
that which we have created. It is not as if society—those
inventions, ideologies and institutions that constitute
society—are independent of human beings, although often we
prefer to believe that this is the case.

We
have little trouble acknowledging that we are the source,
for example, of air conditioners. Writing an essay during
the summer is far more pleasant working in a room where the
temperature is 75 degrees rather than 100 degrees. It’s
clear that we human beings created air conditioners because
we wanted them to exist.

Air Conditioners
Fulfill our Desires. What About War?

Air
conditioners fulfill a need. This cultural creation
articulates a human desire. We are the cause of this
creation. We brought it into existence. The same can be
said of light bulbs, airplanes and numerous other
inventions that fulfill—in an obvious way—human needs,
desires and fantasies. We have no trouble acknowledging—in
these cases—that we are the source.

When
it comes to the institution or cultural form of behavior
called “war,” on the other hand, we are less likely or
willing to recognize that we are the source; that we have
created and embraced warfare because it represents the
fulfillment of human desires. We tend to experience war as
originating in a place outside of the self, as if warfare
manifests against our will. Wars “break out.” They seem
inevitable. They happen because they have to happen. Wars
have always happened. This is the way things are. We are
not responsible.

The
unconscious becomes conscious, Brown says, only through
“projection into the external world.” We project our
fantasies into the world—share our fantasies through an
ideology—and thus create reality. Ideologies are
constructed based upon shared fantasies that are projected
into the world. Warfare represents the enactment of a
shared fantasy. By virtue of the enactment of a shared
fantasy, war becomes a form of reality.

What
are the nature of those desires and fantasies that give
rise to warfare? How does the ideology of war represent a
response to human needs? Why have we created an ideology or
social institution whose main consequence is destruction
and self-destruction? What is the nature of the fulfillment
that warfare provides?

When
I speak of “awakening from the nightmare of history,” I’m
referring to the process of becoming aware of the desires,
fantasies, anxieties and psychic conflicts that give rise
to the ideology of warfare, and to enactments of war within
specific societies at specific times and places. Many
people are “against” war. We assume that we know what war
is. But do we really?

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:We have a special offer as the
holiday season approaches. The author of today’s post, Beverly
Gologorsky, the sort of wonderful fiction writer you don’t often encounter
at this site, has just had her new novel,Stop Here,
published. Set in that classic American institution, the diner, it
takes you directly down the rabbit hole of American life via a set of cooks
and waitresses, their children, lovers, spouses, and assorted others.
I read it and was riveted. It's truly one of a kind. For those
who want to offer this website a little extra holiday cheer, a contribution
of $100 (or more) will get you a personalized, signed copy of Gologorsky’s
remarkable new novel, a book I suspect you’re going to hear a lot more
about. If you want a sense of it, check out thisstriking reviewat the website Full
Stop by Scott Beauchamp (who catches the spirit of the book when he calls
it “a literary Hopper painting”) and then rush to ourdonation pageto check out our offer.
Tom]

In the
years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the
childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier. True, American soldiers
were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often
enoughfound ourselvescrouched under ourschool deskspracticing for the nuclear
destruction of our neighborhoods, but the culture was still focused on
World War II. Enter a movie theater then and as just about any war
flick ended, the Air Force arrived in the nick of time, the Marines
eternally advanced, and victory was ours, aGod-given traitof the American way of life.

In those
days, it was still easy to present war sunny-side up. After all, you
couldn’t go wrong with the Good War -- not that anyone called it that untilStuds Terkelput the phrase into the language
and the culture dropped the quote marks with which he carefully encircled
it. And if your Dad, who had served in one of the great draft armies
of our history, sat beside you silently in that movie theater while John
Wayne saved the world, never saying a word about his war (except in rare
and sudden outbursts of anger), well, that was no problem. His
silence only encouraged you to feel that, given what you’d seen at the
movies (not to speak ofon TV, in books, in comics, and more or
less anywhere else), you already understood his experience and it had been
grand indeed.

And
then, of course, we boys went into the parks, backyards, or fields and
practiced making war the American way, shooting commies, or Ruskies, or
Indians, or Japs, or Nazis with toy guns (or sticks). It may not
sound pretty anymore, but take my word for it, it was glorious back when.

More
than half a century later, those movies are relics of the neolithic
era. The toy six-shooters I once holstered and strapped to my waist,
along with thegreen plastic soldiersthat I used to storm the beaches
of Iwo Jima or Normandy, are somewhere in the trash heap of time. And
in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who believes that America
has a God-given right tovictory?
Still, I have a few relics from that era, lead Civil War and Indian
War-style soldiers who, more than half a century ago, fought out elaborate
battles on my floor, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that holding one
for a moment doesn’t give me some faint wash of emotion from another
age. That emotion, so much stronger then, sent thousands of young
Americans into Vietnamdreaming of John Wayne.

These
days, post-Vietnam, post-9/11, no one rides to the rescue, “victory” is no
longer in our possession, and for the first time in memory, amajority of the publicthinks Washington should “mind its
own business” globally when it comes to war-making. Not surprisingly,
in an America that’slost its appetitefor war, such conflicts are far
more embattled, so much less onscreen, and as novelist Beverly Gologorsky
writes today, unacknowledged in much of American fiction.

There
was nothing sunny about war, even in the 1950s, for the young,
working-class Gologorsky. If my childhood was, in a sense, lit by war
and by a 24/7 economy in which the same giant corporations built ever
larger cars and missiles, television consoles and submarines, hers was
shadowed by it. She sensed, far more than I, the truth of war that
lay in our future. That shadowing is the essence of her deeply moving
“Vietnam” novel,The Things We Do to Make It
Home, and her just-published second novel,Stop Here,
a book that comes to grips in a way both subtle and heart-rending with the
Iraq and Afghan wars without ever leaving the environs of a diner in Long
Island, New York.Tom

I’m a
voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in
recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just
wouldn’t know that -- a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside -- from the
novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, Americans
have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the
Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably
little evidence of it.

As for
myself -- I’m a novelist -- I find that no matter what I chose to write
about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam
vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what
the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or
near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me. So why is it always
lurking there? Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about
just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very
modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.

Going to War in the
South Bronx

I come
from -- to use an old-fashioned phrase -- aworking classimmigrant family. The middle child
of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I
grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the
South Bronx in New York City. In my neighborhood, war -- or at least
the military -- was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t
make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers
and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were
“soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy,
Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods -- multi-ethnic,
diverse, low-income -- it was the way things were and you never thought to question
that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man
who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and,
given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.

Many of
the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of
the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was
still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.)
However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew
well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially
meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that
surrounded us as we grew up.

Then as
now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing
to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned
filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain
for relief.

When I
was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers
arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued,
broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to
Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I dated,
worked with, or was related to men who participated in someof
these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact -- I must
have been three -- is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her
soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally
arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so
many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t
talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things
for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir.

When I
was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can
still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my
childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge,
Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a
paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed
on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of
mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept
close at hand for the rest of his life.

My first
“serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S.Warrington. I was 15. Not
surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction
to alcohol.

I was 18
when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the
Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve
overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the
rest of his life. And so it went.

Today, I
no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as
men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth,
and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by
generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of
whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and
nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense.

Rejecting War

It’s in
the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill
the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War -- I had, by then, made it
out of my neighborhood and my world -- something challenged this
trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way
previously unknown in our history. With that mindset suddenly in
ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war,
ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers.

In those
years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar
movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on
campus. (Working class women worked at paying jobs!) As I
learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was
devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of
American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like
both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather
than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job).

During those years,
two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an
antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where
thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to
Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar
conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours -- and come
in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as
close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused
to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that
coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited,
unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and,
above all, about the country they were invading.

Our
storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus
back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness.
Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the
power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of
them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically
or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why
talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a
blessing.

The
second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A
large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and
seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national
attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act
out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past
the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts
and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement
about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals.
I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the
visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to
collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing.

Breathing War

In those
years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed
me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that
was -- always -- shadowed by war, in fiction.

Why
doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison
once wrote, "Literature is the lie that tells the truth." Yet in
a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in
much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference
points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally
not among them.”

My
suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around
us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part
of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere
in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is
somehow not us.

My own
urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South
African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels -- without, that is,
speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it. When American
fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even
brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace
as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the
lie that denial tells.

That war
shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to
thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s
because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my
characters breathe it, too.

Beverly Gologorsky is the author the just-published novelStop Here(“a literary Hopper painting,”
Seven Stories Press). Her first novel,The Things We Do to Make it
Home, was aNew
York TimesNotable
Book and aLos
Angeles TimesBest
Fiction Book. In the Vietnam years, she was an editor of two political
journals,Viet-ReportandLeviathanand her contribution to
feminism is noted inFeminists
Who Changed America.

It’s all good news for the war
contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the Iraq
War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging us
to send more weapons to the Middle East.

Today, while the radical warrior cult
that now calls itself Islamic State (also known as ISIS) is taking over
large swaths of Iraq and Syria, our tax dollars are simultaneously
supporting ISIS militants in Syria (who have been siphoning off aid
intended for more moderate rebels), bombing ISIS militants in Syria and
Iraq, and arming Syrian rebels and the Kurdish peshmerga to fight ISIS.
It’s all a win-win for the war industry and a lose-lose for the American
taxpayer.

Corporations are amoral by design. While
many good and decent people sit on corporate boards, their fiduciary
responsibility is to maximize returns for shareholders, not to do right by
the American people. This is why alliances between corporations and the
state are historically so dangerous. Yet we have allowed corporate
interests to capture both major political parties and to drive public
policy, with disastrous results, including perpetual war.

Americans have spent trillions of dollars
and seen thousands of our young people killed or maimed since 9/11, only to
see the terror threat spread like a cancer.

All of this is very bad news for the
American people, who will suffer the blowback from the new generation of
kids in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq who will grow up hating the
United States and its missiles and drones. But it’s all good news for the
war contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the
Iraq War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging
us to send more weapons to the Middle East.

Real diplomacy was once embraced by the
press. Recall the famous handshakes between Nixon and Communist Chairman
Mao Zedong, or Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Today, ideas
with any potential to resolve conflict (and threaten profits) are
sabotaged, shouted down or shut out of the debate. Just look at the
relentless efforts to derail the treaty under negotiation with Iran to end
its nuclear weapons program. A belligerent Iran in pursuit of nuclear
weapons may be dangerous, but it’s also good for the war business.

While efforts to remove corporate
influence from public policy through campaign finance reform are failing,
there is another way. We can demand an end to war profiteering. Filling
government contracts should be a form of public service, like serving in
the military. Contractors, like soldiers, should be paid a fair wage but
should not expect to get rich on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer. Today,
residents of the D.C. Area enjoy the highest median household income of any
metro area in the country, thanks in large part to the river of taxpayer
cash flowing to federal contractors.

Here’s one alternative model: The federal
government contracts private lawyers to represent indigent criminal
defendants. These lawyers are paid a fee that covers all basic overhead.
Any significant additional expenses, such as private investigators or experts,
must be pre-approved. Most of these contract lawyers provide high levels of
service, despite knowing that these cases
make them rich.

.S. taxpayers is probably not worth
developing—or, if it is, the development should be done in-house by
scientists earning government salaries.

The government/corporate alliance we have
now is producing more innovations in graft than in technology. Just look at
the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter designed by Lockheed Martin. It is the most
expensive weapon ever built, predicted to cost taxpayers more than a
trillion dollars—enough to buy a mansion for every homeless American, as Hayes
Brown of ThinkProgress has calculated. Yet the F-35 can’t even fly without
catching fire and spewing toxic fumes, and its costly stealth technology is
easily defeated by radar systems that have been widely available since
1940. Today, the most expensive weapon ever built mostly just sits in its
hangar.

If we can take the profit out of war, we
will protect the wallets of U.S. taxpayers, free up resources for projects
that actually benefit us, and interrupt the cycle of perpetual war

LEONARD C. GOODMAN

Leonard Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and
Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul
University.